Beit Iba, Tue 18.12.07, Afternoon

On our way to Beit Iba we stopped at the grocery shop. We were impressed by the amount of vans loaded with sheep.

15:45 About 50-60 people are waiting to be checked.  The soldiers are unpleasant and the commander tries to send us off. We get into an argument with a soldier but we are not sure what his position is.  There is one detainee but we cannot get to him,

16:00 A new captain comes up to us and explains that he is to be the new commander and wants to understand our complaints. He says that the detainee has a forged ID and he has been waiting for two hours for the police. A Palestinian woman comes up to us and says, in good English, that she is a professor of mathematics and besides having to wait in line which is difficult but her self respect is offended when the soldiers curse or humiliate her. We tried to find out who the soldier was who had cursed her and found that it was the same one who had argued with us. We complained to the new commander and it turned out that no one knew who this soldier was and what  he was doing there.  It eventually turned out that it was the driver of the DCO and he was sent away in disgrace.

What is infuriating about this story is that the previous commander and also the representative of the DCO saw the way he behaved and did nothing about it. We did not get to speak to them.

A military policeman arrived and we asked him what alleviations there were for the holiday and he said that there are alerts but they were making things easier for the women.

16:45 At a car checkpoint  5 cars are checked for long minutes and the only reason there are not more cars is because of the lack of permits.
There are 10 cars at the entrance to Nablus and the drivers say they waited one to one-and-a-half hours. An ambulance goes through with hardly any delay. We left and on our way back we saw the detainee with whom we had not been able to speak and someone translated for us. He had been detained because he had argued with the soldiers and cheeked them. The story about his forged ID was false.